M-health: A new doctor–patient relationship

Applications have become a constant in our lives and its use has intensified lately. With the emergence of Play Market and App Store, representatives of the major operating platforms, Apple and Android, has been given the final leap to the mass use of apps.

Statistics indicate an increasingly rapid pace of downloads, among the favorite apps ranging the entertainment and geolocation, followed by the social networking and informative.

Although it seems that we have reached a maximum, the world of apps is about to be discovered. Currently we have a market dominated by marketing or entertainment mobile applications, but the potential it can be exploited from an app is much greater. In future it will be possible to move from the quantitative change to a qualitative one, in other words understand that a mobile application can integrate uses or functionalities that revolutionize the day-to-day existence or to change the business models.

Business and industry sectors are a few of whom might experience profound changes implementing mobility technologies. A successful mobile technology consists of the development of a strategy capable to change and create new values within the set of relationships between customers, employees and partners. Exploiting the mobility implies promoting the innovation and transforming the business model.

Mobility solutions allow a flexible management of the companies, increase productivity and efficiency of business processes, reduce costs and increase the quality of service offered to both customers and employees. The opportunity to increase productivity, to access corporate information anytime and from anywhere has led organizations to implement mobility solutions. Applications to redesign the logistics system of a company, to improve the quality control or to monitor the activity of a commercial network are now possible with mobile technologies.

Apart from all these uses, mobile apps have much more to offer, some of them have not even been developed and others are in draft stage. Human Machine Interface (HMI) are applications used for monitoring and controlling other devices through communication channel. These applications can be used on all the mobile platforms currently available.

We are not far from applying new domestic technological progress like mobile-controled security, lighting or climate control (HVAC), body sensors that indicate whether there is a health problem and that might even provide us the right dose of medication. Robotics is another area where the mobile apps have applicability. Service robots that are able to carry out risky activities as military and spatial robots or those that can execute aid tasks like medical or domestic robots are some examples of the different usage of mobile applications. These are some technological advances in mobility and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Most market apps we can find today have their own utility and users consume them in lack of another alternative, but the progress made in this area clearly indicates a direction towards another kind of mobile apps, the ones which maintain or improve health, optimize production processes, offer more security, control devices or machines. These apps are a step towards progress and an easier and more productive existence. It is true that streaming or messaging apps, that have millions of users around the world have been an extraordinary success simply because they have offered to the user a concept as simple as music or instant messages. So enyone can very easily imagine what will happen when we are going to use apps at their full potencial and for much more complex purposes. It’s when apps will revolutionize the world!